Chapter Eight: Wander This World

God, this is hard.

I walk the streets of Sunnydale in a daze, tears streaming down my cheeks in warm, salty trails. My hands swipe them away before they can fall from my chin, drip down and stain the electric blue tank top I'm wearing.

Faith doesn't cry. Faith doesn't wear colors. Truth be told, Faith could give a flying fuck whether the Scoobies have the warm fuzzies when they think of her or not.

I didn't do a lot of cursing as Buffy. See? She's changing my vocabulary even as we speak.

I don't know when I reach the Bronze. One moment I'm on some side street with houses that put Cordelia's former feudal estate to shame, and the next I'm standing at the bar, swiping at my cheeks with a napkin, facing down a concerned bartender and demanding a blooming onion and a Pepsi.

A blooming onion. Spike's favorite.

It doesn't hit me until I've reached my favorite corner table, ignoring a couple of childish catcalls from a few Wilkins Memorial High seniors on the way. I just ordered Spike's favorite food.

The fact that that was top priority information to me, or that I actually gave a damn, made me shiver. I picked at the onion, listened to some vacant boy band song and tried to tune out the world. Clap on. Clap off. That's me. Buffy, the cheesy infomercial toy.

I can't take it anymore. My best friends hate me. No, hate is too tame a word. And it's not me they hate, it's Faith. But therein lies the problem. I've got the fingerprints, I've got the DNA, and I've got the pouty lip thing going on. I definitely qualify for full Faith status.

Which gets me back to that first square. My best friends hate me.

My sister hates me.

I saved her life, and Dawnie hates me.

The tears come back as the song changes, my trembling hand hiding my face from view as my bottom lip quivers and my eyelid twitches from the force of my crying jag. I'm sure I'm wailing, but I can't be heard past the new song. I don't even know why I'm paying attention to the music anymore, but my mind latches onto the lyrics, as if frantically grabbing for a foothold in the good old seas of reality.

It starts with one thing
I don't know why
It doesn't even matter how hard you try

My tears die down for a minute, my mind connecting. I said something like this to Spike once. He only had a chance with me when I was out. Not a snowball's chance in hell of me and him being any closer than his dance space and my dance space.

The man protected my sister.

Spike was willing to die for Dawn. For me. My last memory of him was as my spirit drifted away, as I left my original body and floated off, and I spotted him in the ruins of the tower, circling my corpse with the rest of them. Agony ripped through him, emotional anguish that tore through his soul (but he doesn't have a soul) and left him a withered, sobbing heap on the ground. And as I watched him break down, I realized that I'd been wrong about him.

He really had loved me. Maybe he still did.

Time is a valuable thing
Watch it fly by as the pendulum swings
Watch it count down to the end of the day
The clock ticks life away
It's so unreal
Didn't look out below

And I bark out a laugh at that, not meaning to, the people walking past me giving me weird looks. Take a Polaroid, they last longer.

Another Spike thought. Neither one of us looked out below.

I start to sway a little to the music. No dancing ... it's fairly difficult to tamely dance to a Linkin Park song. And it's not exactly the Gund Bear of rock songs, but the lyrics hit me head on.

Trying to hold on, but didn't even know
Wasted it all just to watch you go
I kept everything inside and even though I tried, it all fell apart
What it meant to me will eventually be a memory of a time when
I tried so hard
And got so far
but in the end
it doesn't even matter

And suddenly, it's Spike's song.

He had tried hard. And on that last night, as I stood on the stairs and listened to him tell me that he knew I'd never love him, there was a split second where I really wanted to. He deserved it so much.

But in the end, it hadn't really mattered.

Oh, God. I haven't seen him yet.

I had to fall
to lose it all
but in the end
it doesn't even matter

I reach the cemetery in record time, sprinting so fast the cool night air burns my throat on the way out. I race down the sidewalks, bound over the cast iron fence surrounding the graveyard, leap over gravestones like speed bumps. I don't know why I need to see Spike so badly. But my mind's got one track right now, and it's headed straight for Spikeland

The demons and vampires that lurk in the shadows vanish from my consciousness. I'm only alert for one thing.

The crypt.

I practically have to put on the brakes as I skid to a stop, leaving tread marks in the grass. A part of me senses he's not in there even before I lift my fist to knock. But I do it anyway.

Wait a second, what the hell am I doing?

First off, I'm Buffy. I barge in to Spike's crypt. I don't knock. No one knocks.

And second off, I'm Faith. Spike's not my friend. Spike's not even a white hat. He's the enemy. Plus, Faith doesn't even know Spike lives here. At least, I think she didn't. Amnesia Faith certainly wouldn't.

I don't care. I open the door and saunter right in.

I was right. He's not here.

Silence is a heavy fog that weighs heavily in the crypt, permeating every corner of it. It's a dense, empty thing that crawls over my skin like a handful of ants. The TV is there, the easy chair, the bedding tucked neatly over the sarcophagus. But Spike's not here. He hasn't been here in a while. I just know.

I can't even smell him in here anymore. He always smelled like leather and cigarettes and blood, and it's just ... none of it is here anymore.

My fingers drift over the rough, duct-taped fabric on the easy chair, and my hand grabs on tight before I realize I'm doing it.

Spike's gone. He has to be. He's not here. No one's mentioned him. He left.

Oh, God. Maybe he couldn't live without me and he staked himself. And I'll just steer away from that train of thought because it involves a very self-centered engineer.

I let go of the chair reluctantly, pull away before I get too attached. What the hell am I doing? It wasn't as if I was in love with the guy. I mean, I liked him. He was always solid for a big bicker session, which was always of the good. And he took care of my mom and Dawn like they were his.

But still, he was the Big Bad, even with the electronic muzzle. He wasn't ...

I don't know. Maybe I was hoping that if I ran to Spike, I'd find someone who wasn't already predisposed to a blind hatred of me. Although on second thought, a Slayer looking to a bloodsucker for hugs and back pats sounds like the work of a mentally challenged mind.

"Faith? Are you here?"

The voice from outside, which sounds like it's coming from Giles, doesn't get my attention until it starts moving closer to the crypt. Wake up, stupid. You're Faith. You're legally obligated to answer.

I head for the door and close it behind me quietly, so he won't see where I was, then yell back. Yeah? What's up?

I come around a crowd of tall bushes and nearly walk right into Giles. He tries to restrain himself from scowling down at me. "I've been looking all over for you. It's getting late. I think that's enough patrolling for your first night back, wouldn't you say?"

I don't answer. I'm not supposed to remember. For all I'm supposed to know, I should be out here until sunup. Besides, he makes it sound as if I'm four, and trick-or-treating.

It takes an uncomfortable moment, but he finally gets it. Giles flushes a little and stammers, "Oh, right." Oops. Smooth move, sconehead.

I don't even realize that I've said that last part out loud until he really does glare at me. I summon up that last little bit of me that's Faith and saunter past as if I haven't even said anything all that bad.

I hear him jogging a bit to catch up with me. Hmm. I must be walking faster than I thought I was. "Faith, may I ask you something?"

Shoot, I say.

"Why were you patrolling in this particular cemetery?" He sounds a little curious.

Uh-oh. Busted. I try to sound innocent. I say, I dunno. I heard a rumor there was a vampire living somewhere in this dump. Although why he'd go so low-rent, I'll never know.

Giles nearly smiles at that, but stops himself. "Yes, well, there was. But we got rid of him. Sort of."

I freeze. What'd they do, make him leave town? I can't believe I'm acting this way, but I nearly snap at him as I say, You did what? From the look on his face, I know I've got him thinking. Giles thinking is never good if he's not on your side, so I add, Sure, ruin my fun, why don't you?

Giles shakes his head and follows as I start walking again. "Oh, no," he says. "We didn't stake him. He's living with Xander and Anya."

I don't think he notices me stop as he keeps walking and goes right past me.

Pigs have thirty-minute orgasms. There was once this chicken that lived without a head for eighteen months. If you wear a Halloween costume in Ireland, you go to jail for a year. Spike is living with Xander and Anya.

Okay. Now, I've heard everything.

Chapter Nine